The World, from my perspective

Considering I haven't added a post to this blog in way to long, I fully expect to have been really busy with what life has thrown my way. That isn't really true. For while I have tried to take a trip every weekend (more on those in a bit), most of my time has been spent working in the dining room of the Kibbutz, operating a dishwasher and other souse chef obligations. Yes, I rather prefer the term souse chef over dishboy, even though I'll be neither in ten days. 'Cause in ten days lambing season begins and given my extraordinary experience with animals *cough, cough* I managed to wrangle a job as a midwife. It's gonna be totally awesome! But now to the weekends and what spectacular places I've seen so far. In short: The Golan Heights The Sea of Galilee Castle Nimrod (most awesome castle name ever!) Nazareth (on Christmas Day, ha!) River Jordan The country Jordan (though only from a distance) Lebanon (same as Jordan) Syria (ditto) And come Friday I'll be hea...

That would be the name where I'm currently living. It's a pretty small Kibbutz with around 650 kibbutzim (that would be folks who live there full time), a bunch of people who only work there and about 20 volunteers (that would include your own personal Icelandic writer dude, aka me). It's located just south of Nazareth, about 15 km from the Jordanian border, overlooking mount Gilsomethingorother. It's in the Bible, look it up if you want to. I'm gonna try to hike up it on Saturday and then I promise to find out what it's actually called. Geva makes its living from a big-ass factory that makes something with air-pressure-valves; also they have orange groves, almond trees, about 700 cows, 50 horses, tons of sheep, scores of cats and heaps of dogs (a heap would be aproxomately 5 scores if you're interested). But let's focus on the dogs this time. Dogs are, after all, the single most leet animal in the world... maybe excluding hippos. But as there are no hip...

I took a walk around the Kibbutz this morning and saw "everything". Everything ranging from the library (with a memorial room) to the lamb-pens. The latter is much cooler according to your own personal Icelandic reporting guy. We (I and a french guy who also arrived yesterday) saw that they had put the calfs in their own little pens and he showed me the coolest trick! If you reach out like three fingers the calfs start sucking and licking them. It felt really friggnn awesome and waay cool to this city slicker. And the same thing with all the little lambs (no worries, they're still too small for my killing instincts to set in). Animals are great! But then, as we had decided to take the scenic rounabout way back to our place, we walked past this grapefruit tree and noticed that it was fruiting (blooming?). So simple as that, we picked us a fresh grapefruit straight from the tree... man! It was the best piece of fruit I've ever had. Life really is great!

Får bli på engelska, eftersom jag kände för det: After far too many hours in the sky, stuck in a crammed airplane, eating lame food, not getting any beers and neither many hours of sleep, I finally touched down in Tel Aviv at around 4.30 this morning (local time, whatever that's called). As I've just walked out of the plane, this guy in a funny red beard, wearing a vest with something written in weird characters on it, asks me if he can ask me some questions. I, having just woken up from the aforementioned far too few hours of sleep, manage to grunt out a "sure" after which he swings into full action... first asking to see my passport, tickets, travel itinerary (spelling?), why I'm here, what I'm gonna do, what my shoe size is, why I'm wearing hiking boots and probably several thousand more questions. Apparently he's not to amuzed with my muttered answers and asks me to follow him somewhere else. Somewhere else turns out to be next to the passport con...

Cardinal Ernst von Henckelman was in a rather somber mood this evening at the palazzo, just outside of Rome. He had poured himself a quite liberal drink of Napoleonic Cognac and was puffing on a Ramon Allones Specially Selected while enjoying the comfort of a leather armchair in the library. In his lap, was a huge tome, which he opened and begun reading the ancient history of the Order. It was a matter of doing things the way they had always been done; borderline superstition. He had read the same chapter of the tome on every evening he had sent someone out on a quest to fight the powers of darkness. As had his predecessor and his before him, all through the ages. For the Order was old. As old as the Church, most of his order-brethren would say. But the fact of the matter was that without the Order, there would be no Church. Actually, with almost complete certainty, there wouldn’t be much of anything anyone would care about on the darkened, scorched, remains of God’s green Earth. Von H...

He stood on the tarmac, two large handcrafted suitcases, a carryon and a carefully rolled package beside him and waited for his pickup to arrive. Deciding to make use of this moment of unexpected solitude he opened the package, revealing a close to one meter long sword in a scabbard. He went through his carryon, finding his ever-present whetstone and began sharpening the thousands-layered blade. Being pleased with his work, he slid the sword back into the scabbard and opened one of the suitcases. Browsing through the assortment of luggage they had packed for him, he finally found a plastic case close to the bottom of the suitcase and took it out. It contained a pair of Glock 18.s and plenty of 33 round 9mm jacketed hollow point magazines. Realizing that he probably had some time for them too, he took a seat on his other suitcase and set about wiping them. “Where was that friggin pickup?” he thought, while polishing the glowing black harbingers of death. A few minutes later, he saw a be...

The journey to Campino was just as uneventful as one might expect when driving through Rome in the middle of a weekday; traffic aplenty with Vespas zipping through traffic like they owned the road. His driver apparently had some skill and experience with Roman traffic and spent most of the drive continuing the interrupted discussion about football, even once in a while throwing a question or statement back towards the back seat. Absalom gave them some non-answers, having decided he wasn’t going to be mocked for his good taste in teams, by these Polentone. Actually, he wasn’t even Italian, but having had Rome as home base for as long as he had, it was the only home he had. Now, if he only managed to persuade the Cardinal to give him a palazzo of his own, he’d have nothing to complain about. The car pulled past the normal parking spaces of Campino Airport, barely stopping to show the security guards their badges and pulled onto the private part of the runway. While most air-traffic into ...